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Sunday, 26 October 2014

Elbrus - Tolstoy

Reading anything by Count Leo
Tolstoy had never been on my literary horizon. Dostoevsky and Gorki crossed my
path early on but the sheer and frightening weight of titles such as “War and
Peace” and “Anna Karenia” kept me well away from Tolstoy and I fell instead towards
the beguiling heavy Teutonic Hermann Hesse – which perhaps better fulfilled
post adolescent angst. Tolstoy has been left unread and unacknowledged ever
since until a generous friend gave me (yes, gave and not lent) a volume of
three Tolstoy novellas – one of which was entitled The Cossacks – because he
felt I would be interested in this having just returned from the Caucasus
Region. This was in itself a revelation
because I had not linked the Cossack people to the region of Kabardino-Balkaria
that I had just returned from.

A little bit of research uncovered that
during the latter part of WWII Stalin accused the Balkar residents of the
region of collaborating with the enemy and banished the whole lot of them and
they were only allowed back to their homeland a decade and a half later. This would
seem to be a minor upset for the region when seen against historical dominance
from the Mongols (1200’s), the Georgians (1200’s to 1500’s) the Persian Empire
(1500’s), the Ottoman Empire (also the 1500’s), and then fractiously under the
Russian Empire in the 1700’s. There was a brief period of independence in the
1700’s before the region was annexed by Russia, and then after various
alliances and mis-alliances it was incorporated into the glorious Soviet Union
where it was saddled with ever increasingly heavy and bombastic names – “Kabardin
Autonomous Oblast”, “Kabardino-Balkar Autonomous Oblast”, and then “Kabardino-Balkar
Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic”.

Latterly of course it has been at the geographical
heart of the mad-geopolitics that seems to have gripped the region with
fighting in Chechnya, Georgia, and Ossetia – none of which makes any sense to
anyone who has little or no knowledge of this dark and mysterious region. All
this in a confined area with a declining population of less than 1m people,
five majority ethnic groups among many others; where 55% of the population are
Muslim, and there are at least three different languages spoken. “Complex” and “fundamentally ungovernable”
are phrases that spring to mind, not just of Kabardino-Balkaria, but the
neighbouring territories.

So back to Tolstoy and his novella “The
Cossacks” which describes in human terms this region in the 1860’s. Beautifully
written it to me captures a time and circumstance that I suspect has changed in
essence very little in the intervening 150 or so years. The geo-politics is
still tinged with madness, people still live with it and make do as best they
can, but over it all the magisterial landscape is solid and uncompromising.